Harkat Studios Art & Performance Space

Harkat Studios Art & Performance Space

is creating Live Performances and Multi-Art Experiences

5

patrons

$154

per month

We are an alternative performance & arts spacein Mumbai's suburb of Andheri. "Andheri" means "place of darkness" and through many serendipitous events in the last 1.5 years, we were able to bring a little bit of light into this part of town. When we started out, there was no culture in a radius of 10km except for a few pubs and bars. Since then we've curated over 150 performances in the realm of theatre, dance, music, poetry and exhibitions. Harkat has really become a community centre, a home to artists and a neighbourhood space. Our quaint little bungalow is a creative oasis hidden beneath the last remaining old trees in a city full of concrete high-rises.We are here to ask you to help us keep this oasis alive - and maybe even go beyond that and make Harkat even more vibrant and creative and happening!

The Museum of Ordinary Objects

Why does the world need Harkat?1. WE ARE A HOME FOR ARTISTS AND EVERYONE ELSE ALIKE

Believe it or not, in this city of 18 million people, spaces where artists can sit and think, rehearse and perform, write and discuss practically
didn't exist. Open almost 24/7 and doubling as a co-working space, Harkat has been giving artists and "non-artists" a safe space with plenty of room for inspiring conversations and chai on the house.Theatre in Mumbai used to be a sort of "purist" stage theatre. We are the exact opposite. Our studio is like a living room - for both the artists and the audience. And thus, we have become a home.

Karl Marx in Kalbadevi

The Museum of Ordinary Objects

Our first show, Karl Marx in Kalbadevi, set the tone of what Harkat was going to be: quirky, political, intelligent and very entertaining. In first exhibition, the Museum of Ordinary Objects (now in its 3rd edition) we explored the subjective value of everyday objects. It involved a barter system where people from the neighbourhood could bring their objects and tell their story. This has set the tone of how we and our community sees Harkat. As a community centre in a country where this concept doesn't exist.

2. WE ARE POLITICAL AND NOT AFRAIDWe've housed performances which were daring and pushing boundaries in a country where censorship is a sad and terrifying reality .
What makes
Harkat special is that we don't only host theatre plays and concerts, but we curate in-house performances, together with artists from all kinds of art forms. Our favourites include Me & The Other - Performances on Gender which had rappers, comedians, musicians, dancers, poets and storytellers all coming together. We're right now planning the 3rd edition! And In the Mood for Melancholia, a 3-hour performance which explores melancholy through live painting, chansons, a play, sand art and kalari payattu.
And we have revived some old art forms, like the
Mushaira - an ancient form of a spoken word, where poets recite in Urdu poetry, while the audience sits in a circle around them.

Me & The Other - Performances on Gender (Sofia Ashraf, Rapper)

3. WE DON'T BELIEVE IN "HIGH ART"We do exactly the opposite - we demystify. We are one of 2 spaces which host Western Classical Music. And the only one where the artists explain what they play, why they play it and what it means to them. Indian Classical music used to be played in a court setting, with people sitting almost next to the musicians, and only recently has it been elevated on a stage. We bring it back to earth and let the artists share what they feel when they play a certain raag.

Some Raw Love - Poetry and Kathak mixed with Woodie Allen and Amrita Pritam4. WE ARE AN ALTERNATIVE TO BOLLYWOOD CINEPLEXESThe NFDC (National Film Development Corporation India) Film Festival 2017 took place at Harkat Studios. Over the course of 2 weeks, we showed Indian classics and conversed with film maker legends like Kamal Swaroop, Rajat Kapoor and Ketan Mehta. These films are otherwise not available and have shaped an entire generation. It was the first time, that NFDC moved into an alternative space with their festival.
In December 2017, we curated Mumbai's first
16mm Film Festival, with workshops where people could make their own 16mm film and show it on our original vintage projector, and screenings of found footage experimental films and international shorts.
On every second Friday, we screen German films in collaboration with the Goethe Institute Mumbai.
And - the icing on the cake - we work towards being an alternative to cineplexes for indie films from across the world. In the last two months we've shown
Man from Earth with a Q&A with the director, the cineplay Boichek and the Indian festival wonder CRD.

5. WE LISTEN TO OUR COMMUNITY
Let's me honest, we only exist because the community around us likes us a fair bit. That's why we listen to them and we can be basically anything they want us to be.
That's why we have been for example housing the
first organic farmers' market in this area of town - yes, in India we do have street vendors, but unfortunately these fruits and veggies are all full of pesticides. So we tied up with organic farming collectives.

Harkat Organic Farmers' Market

6. WE ARE FOR EVERYONE
Imagine a city full of concrete playgrounds.
For long we have been missing sustained arts engagement for children & the young in the city. At the Harkat Sunday Oasis, children and young people can identify as their own artistic playground. A space that recognizes human need for the arts, respects inherent creative expressions, cherishes individual & collective potentials. And recognizes creative expression as a fundamental right of every child & individual. So far we've held toddler workshops, game afternoons, international storytelling and a non-verbal play.

______

How much does all of this cost?

1. Rental of infrastructure
We are a DIY (or like we say in India "Jugaad") space. We can achieve almost any kind of lighting, mood, soundscape and stage design. All costs, such as renting lights, mics or extra chairs are covered by us, because we see this as our responsibility as the space. The artists bring their craft, we give the infrastructure (unless the performance needs like a truckload of lights, then they are encouraged to down-size or bring them themselves).

2. Man-power
We are a co-working space during the day, so for performances in the evening we need to carry all the chairs and tables out into the courtyard. During performance, we sometimes serve chai and in the breaks we provide basic sandwiches and lemonade. Luckily we have a very awesome office boy who helps us out with all these things, no matter how late or early in the day. But that also means that all of us work almost around the clock, 7 days a week. After 1.5 years into running Harkat, we are aware that this is not sustainable.

3. Marketing & PR
We are extremely lucky to have PR experts, writers and graphic designers in-house as part of the film making team. Many spaces abroad offer "PR" as a separate service that they charge for, but we think it's our responsibility as much as the artists' to get people to watch the show!
So we

- send out PR notes and press releases;
-
designposters (because we are a design studio after all and we know that stuff needs to look good to sell),
- print and distribute
posters around the neighbourhood;
- create
facebook events (and sometimes run ads /sponsored posts);
- send out a nicely-designed
mailer;
- and handle all
ticketing platforms.

4. Rent
Mumbai is amongst the
most expensive cities in the world in terms of real estate. It's, frankly speaking, ridiculous.
Our space has 800sqft and we pay rental of around-about
1,500 EUR per month (excl. electricity).
Our tickets sell for an average of 4 EUR (as comparison, regular cinema tickets are between 1-9 EUR, so we're on the lower end). We can house up to 50 people.
Our show days are Saturday evening, Sunday morning and evening (the Friday shows in collaboration with the Goethe Institute are for free).
We do a 50/50 profit share with the artists.

______

How the heck does Harkat afford all of this?

The answer is: Through miracles, mostly. We are film makers and graphic designers in "real life" and finance Harkat Studios entirely through our income from making digital ads, documentaries and conceptual videos.
Most performances are ticketed, at a reasonable rate of 200-400 INR (2-6 EUR) . And the ticket sales are shared 50/50 between Harkat and the artists.

______

How many people work at Harkat?

We're a core team of 4 people. Karan and Mika are the founders, Ram is the office boy and Sheba is part of the film making team but helps out on most of the performances.

______

What happens if you support Harkat?

(1) We continue to exist With the amount we are asking for, we can focus on programming and expanding our program to Friday nights, Saturday afternoons and Sunday afternoon. With more performances programmed, we can earn more from ticket sales.

(2) We can invest in better infrastructure
Jugaad/DIY is cool, but sometimes a proper fader or mixer would just be what's needed to make a performance truly outstanding. With your donation, we will purchase:

an 8-channel mixer

4x LED lights with fader for the stage

2 mics + mic stands

an HD projector

high-quality sound system

You might wonder how we managed to far without all of this. So do we! But it proves how driven and inventive we are :) So rest assured, these few things will actually take our performances to the next level!

(3) More innovative performances
As curators we always try to have a balance between unknown, upcoming artists, experimental pieces and commercially successful plays and concerts. Sometimes financial constraints make us vote in favour of concepts that have been "proved and tested" in order to keep the risk at a minimum. But the point of an alternative space is to give an alternative platform. With your donation, we can concentrate on pushing boundaries and promoting young artists!

(4) Hire an assistant
We desperately need to hire an extra hand who can help out with marketing before and setup/ f&b during the events.

(5) Pay our artists a wee more
The cultural situation in Mumbai is so dire that most artists are just happy that they get a space to perform, because obviously it's next to impossible to make a living from the 50% of ticket sales. We believe that art should be paid fairly, but right now we are struggling to afford the space. With your donation, we'll hopefully be able to pay the artists a little better.
And with the financial cushion that your donation will allow us, we can get more senior artists on board of our in-house performances.

(6) Curate better
We want to bring more performances from across the country or even the world to our neighbourhood. The art world is a small world, and there's so much great art in this country - beyond Mumbai! If we could afford to
bring a show from Bangalore or Calcutta to our neighbourhood, it would help the artists to get more exposure and our audience would get to see new faces, new concepts!
Right now we've been very lucky that bands and performers travelling through the city have been enthusiastic to perform at Harkat, but imagine we could call someone from abroad to perform here. Okay, now we're day-dreaming. But hey, a new play from Bangalore would already be awesome!

(7) Make art accessible to allIf you walk around the corner from Harkat, you will find really affluent middle-class families in one street and in the next, low income housing societies where there's just about enough money for food, but definitely nothing left to spare to see a play. To be veritably inclusive, we aspire to also be able to have shows free of cost, while still paying the artists at least a token amount and covering our costs.In an ideal world, with your continuous contribution, we'll make this a reality!

Tiers

Bicycle

$1 or more per month

LOVE!

We'll give you a big thank-you shout-out on all our social media channels and send a big warm hug across the oceans and mountains all the way to you.

- Exclusive access to our patron newsfeed
What's in the newsfeed? The secret life inside Harkat (behind-the-scenes, an occasional live stream, ideation sessions, interviews with our artists and more!)

Teleporting

Goals

$154 of $1,000 per month

When we reach 1,000 we'll start a podcast of our Wohnzimmerkonzerts (Living Room singer-songwriter sessions) where you can watch & listen to all the upcoming indie artists and their anecdotes in high quality.

1 of 2

We are an alternative performance & arts spacein Mumbai's suburb of Andheri. "Andheri" means "place of darkness" and through many serendipitous events in the last 1.5 years, we were able to bring a little bit of light into this part of town. When we started out, there was no culture in a radius of 10km except for a few pubs and bars. Since then we've curated over 150 performances in the realm of theatre, dance, music, poetry and exhibitions. Harkat has really become a community centre, a home to artists and a neighbourhood space. Our quaint little bungalow is a creative oasis hidden beneath the last remaining old trees in a city full of concrete high-rises.We are here to ask you to help us keep this oasis alive - and maybe even go beyond that and make Harkat even more vibrant and creative and happening!

The Museum of Ordinary Objects

Why does the world need Harkat?1. WE ARE A HOME FOR ARTISTS AND EVERYONE ELSE ALIKE

Believe it or not, in this city of 18 million people, spaces where artists can sit and think, rehearse and perform, write and discuss practically
didn't exist. Open almost 24/7 and doubling as a co-working space, Harkat has been giving artists and "non-artists" a safe space with plenty of room for inspiring conversations and chai on the house.Theatre in Mumbai used to be a sort of "purist" stage theatre. We are the exact opposite. Our studio is like a living room - for both the artists and the audience. And thus, we have become a home.

Karl Marx in Kalbadevi

The Museum of Ordinary Objects

Our first show, Karl Marx in Kalbadevi, set the tone of what Harkat was going to be: quirky, political, intelligent and very entertaining. In first exhibition, the Museum of Ordinary Objects (now in its 3rd edition) we explored the subjective value of everyday objects. It involved a barter system where people from the neighbourhood could bring their objects and tell their story. This has set the tone of how we and our community sees Harkat. As a community centre in a country where this concept doesn't exist.

2. WE ARE POLITICAL AND NOT AFRAIDWe've housed performances which were daring and pushing boundaries in a country where censorship is a sad and terrifying reality .
What makes
Harkat special is that we don't only host theatre plays and concerts, but we curate in-house performances, together with artists from all kinds of art forms. Our favourites include Me & The Other - Performances on Gender which had rappers, comedians, musicians, dancers, poets and storytellers all coming together. We're right now planning the 3rd edition! And In the Mood for Melancholia, a 3-hour performance which explores melancholy through live painting, chansons, a play, sand art and kalari payattu.
And we have revived some old art forms, like the
Mushaira - an ancient form of a spoken word, where poets recite in Urdu poetry, while the audience sits in a circle around them.

Me & The Other - Performances on Gender (Sofia Ashraf, Rapper)

3. WE DON'T BELIEVE IN "HIGH ART"We do exactly the opposite - we demystify. We are one of 2 spaces which host Western Classical Music. And the only one where the artists explain what they play, why they play it and what it means to them. Indian Classical music used to be played in a court setting, with people sitting almost next to the musicians, and only recently has it been elevated on a stage. We bring it back to earth and let the artists share what they feel when they play a certain raag.

Some Raw Love - Poetry and Kathak mixed with Woodie Allen and Amrita Pritam4. WE ARE AN ALTERNATIVE TO BOLLYWOOD CINEPLEXESThe NFDC (National Film Development Corporation India) Film Festival 2017 took place at Harkat Studios. Over the course of 2 weeks, we showed Indian classics and conversed with film maker legends like Kamal Swaroop, Rajat Kapoor and Ketan Mehta. These films are otherwise not available and have shaped an entire generation. It was the first time, that NFDC moved into an alternative space with their festival.
In December 2017, we curated Mumbai's first
16mm Film Festival, with workshops where people could make their own 16mm film and show it on our original vintage projector, and screenings of found footage experimental films and international shorts.
On every second Friday, we screen German films in collaboration with the Goethe Institute Mumbai.
And - the icing on the cake - we work towards being an alternative to cineplexes for indie films from across the world. In the last two months we've shown
Man from Earth with a Q&A with the director, the cineplay Boichek and the Indian festival wonder CRD.

5. WE LISTEN TO OUR COMMUNITY
Let's me honest, we only exist because the community around us likes us a fair bit. That's why we listen to them and we can be basically anything they want us to be.
That's why we have been for example housing the
first organic farmers' market in this area of town - yes, in India we do have street vendors, but unfortunately these fruits and veggies are all full of pesticides. So we tied up with organic farming collectives.

Harkat Organic Farmers' Market

6. WE ARE FOR EVERYONE
Imagine a city full of concrete playgrounds.
For long we have been missing sustained arts engagement for children & the young in the city. At the Harkat Sunday Oasis, children and young people can identify as their own artistic playground. A space that recognizes human need for the arts, respects inherent creative expressions, cherishes individual & collective potentials. And recognizes creative expression as a fundamental right of every child & individual. So far we've held toddler workshops, game afternoons, international storytelling and a non-verbal play.

______

How much does all of this cost?

1. Rental of infrastructure
We are a DIY (or like we say in India "Jugaad") space. We can achieve almost any kind of lighting, mood, soundscape and stage design. All costs, such as renting lights, mics or extra chairs are covered by us, because we see this as our responsibility as the space. The artists bring their craft, we give the infrastructure (unless the performance needs like a truckload of lights, then they are encouraged to down-size or bring them themselves).

2. Man-power
We are a co-working space during the day, so for performances in the evening we need to carry all the chairs and tables out into the courtyard. During performance, we sometimes serve chai and in the breaks we provide basic sandwiches and lemonade. Luckily we have a very awesome office boy who helps us out with all these things, no matter how late or early in the day. But that also means that all of us work almost around the clock, 7 days a week. After 1.5 years into running Harkat, we are aware that this is not sustainable.

3. Marketing & PR
We are extremely lucky to have PR experts, writers and graphic designers in-house as part of the film making team. Many spaces abroad offer "PR" as a separate service that they charge for, but we think it's our responsibility as much as the artists' to get people to watch the show!
So we

- send out PR notes and press releases;
-
designposters (because we are a design studio after all and we know that stuff needs to look good to sell),
- print and distribute
posters around the neighbourhood;
- create
facebook events (and sometimes run ads /sponsored posts);
- send out a nicely-designed
mailer;
- and handle all
ticketing platforms.

4. Rent
Mumbai is amongst the
most expensive cities in the world in terms of real estate. It's, frankly speaking, ridiculous.
Our space has 800sqft and we pay rental of around-about
1,500 EUR per month (excl. electricity).
Our tickets sell for an average of 4 EUR (as comparison, regular cinema tickets are between 1-9 EUR, so we're on the lower end). We can house up to 50 people.
Our show days are Saturday evening, Sunday morning and evening (the Friday shows in collaboration with the Goethe Institute are for free).
We do a 50/50 profit share with the artists.

______

How the heck does Harkat afford all of this?

The answer is: Through miracles, mostly. We are film makers and graphic designers in "real life" and finance Harkat Studios entirely through our income from making digital ads, documentaries and conceptual videos.
Most performances are ticketed, at a reasonable rate of 200-400 INR (2-6 EUR) . And the ticket sales are shared 50/50 between Harkat and the artists.

______

How many people work at Harkat?

We're a core team of 4 people. Karan and Mika are the founders, Ram is the office boy and Sheba is part of the film making team but helps out on most of the performances.

______

What happens if you support Harkat?

(1) We continue to exist With the amount we are asking for, we can focus on programming and expanding our program to Friday nights, Saturday afternoons and Sunday afternoon. With more performances programmed, we can earn more from ticket sales.

(2) We can invest in better infrastructure
Jugaad/DIY is cool, but sometimes a proper fader or mixer would just be what's needed to make a performance truly outstanding. With your donation, we will purchase:

an 8-channel mixer

4x LED lights with fader for the stage

2 mics + mic stands

an HD projector

high-quality sound system

You might wonder how we managed to far without all of this. So do we! But it proves how driven and inventive we are :) So rest assured, these few things will actually take our performances to the next level!

(3) More innovative performances
As curators we always try to have a balance between unknown, upcoming artists, experimental pieces and commercially successful plays and concerts. Sometimes financial constraints make us vote in favour of concepts that have been "proved and tested" in order to keep the risk at a minimum. But the point of an alternative space is to give an alternative platform. With your donation, we can concentrate on pushing boundaries and promoting young artists!

(4) Hire an assistant
We desperately need to hire an extra hand who can help out with marketing before and setup/ f&b during the events.

(5) Pay our artists a wee more
The cultural situation in Mumbai is so dire that most artists are just happy that they get a space to perform, because obviously it's next to impossible to make a living from the 50% of ticket sales. We believe that art should be paid fairly, but right now we are struggling to afford the space. With your donation, we'll hopefully be able to pay the artists a little better.
And with the financial cushion that your donation will allow us, we can get more senior artists on board of our in-house performances.

(6) Curate better
We want to bring more performances from across the country or even the world to our neighbourhood. The art world is a small world, and there's so much great art in this country - beyond Mumbai! If we could afford to
bring a show from Bangalore or Calcutta to our neighbourhood, it would help the artists to get more exposure and our audience would get to see new faces, new concepts!
Right now we've been very lucky that bands and performers travelling through the city have been enthusiastic to perform at Harkat, but imagine we could call someone from abroad to perform here. Okay, now we're day-dreaming. But hey, a new play from Bangalore would already be awesome!

(7) Make art accessible to allIf you walk around the corner from Harkat, you will find really affluent middle-class families in one street and in the next, low income housing societies where there's just about enough money for food, but definitely nothing left to spare to see a play. To be veritably inclusive, we aspire to also be able to have shows free of cost, while still paying the artists at least a token amount and covering our costs.In an ideal world, with your continuous contribution, we'll make this a reality!

Recent posts by Harkat Studios Art & Performance Space

Tiers

Bicycle

$1 or more per month

LOVE!

We'll give you a big thank-you shout-out on all our social media channels and send a big warm hug across the oceans and mountains all the way to you.

- Exclusive access to our patron newsfeed
What's in the newsfeed? The secret life inside Harkat (behind-the-scenes, an occasional live stream, ideation sessions, interviews with our artists and more!)